Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Subject did not dress nor did he eat; he had never been observed to eat in his sleeping quarters. He did pause to evacuate liquid waste over an open drain in the floor. The thick greenish liquid cascaded from a cloacal gap in his lower abdomen. There was, of course, no sound to accompany the image, but Marguerite’s imagination supplied the splash and gurgle.

  She reminded herself that these events had happened half a century ago. It lessened her sense of invasion. She would never speak to this creature, never interact with him in any way; this image, however mysteriously it had traveled, was in all likelihood limited to the speed of light. The parent star 47 Ursa Majoris was fifty-one light years from Earth.

  (And by the same token, if anyone elsewhere in the galaxy were watching her, she would be safely in her grave long before her observers could attempt to interpret her bathroom functions.)

  Subject left his warren without preamble. His two-legged gait looked awkward by human standards, but it covered ground efficiently. This part of the day could be interesting. Subject did essentially the same thing every morning—walked to the factory where he assembled machine parts—but he seldom took the same route to work. Enough evidence had accumulated to suggest that this was a cultural or biological imperative (i.e., most others did the same thing), perhaps out of an atavistic instinct to avoid predation. Too bad; Marguerite would have preferred to think of it as Subject’s idiosyncrasy, an individual preference, a discernible choice.

  In any case, the observation program tracked him precisely and predictably. When Subject moved, the apparent point of view (the “virtual camera,” folks in Image Acquisition called it) followed him at a constant distance. Subject was centered in the screen but his world was visible around him as he traveled. He strode with others of his kind through the incandescently lit corridors of his warren, everyone moving in the same direction, as if the passages were one-way streets, though their “wayness” varied day by day. In a crowd, she had learned to identify Subject not just by the centrality of his image (he was sometimes, briefly, obscured from view) but by the vivid orange-yellow of his dorsal-cranial crest and the rounded contour of his shoulders.

  She glimpsed daylight as he passed balconies and rotundas that opened to the air. The sky today was powdery blue. Lobsterville got most of its rain during the mild winter season, and it was high summer now, the very middle of the southern latitude’s long dalliance with the sun. The planet possessed a gentle axial tilt but a very lengthy orbit around its star: it would be summer in the Subject’s city for another two terrestrial years.

  In summer it was more often dust than rain clouds that darkened the sky. UMa47/E was drier than the Earth; like Mars, it could generate vast electrically charged dust storms. There was always fine dust suspended in the atmosphere, and the skies were never as clear as a terrestrial sky. But today was calm, Marguerite surmised. Warm, judging by the flourish of the Subject’s cooling cilia. The colored-chalk blue of the sky was as good as it got. (Marguerite blinked and imagined Arizona or New Mexico, cliffside pueblos in a still noon.)

  At last the Subject emerged onto one of the broad exterior ways that wound down to the floor of the city.

  The original high-altitude survey had identified no less than forty of these large stone cities, and twice as many significantly smaller ones, scattered across the surface of UMa47/E. Marguerite kept a globe of Subject’s planet on her desk, the cities marked and named only by their latitude and longitude. (No one wanted to give them proper names for fear of seeming arrogant or anthropocentric—“Lobsterville” was only a nickname, and you learned not to use it in front of administrators or the press.)

  Maybe it was even an error of attribution to call this community a “city.” But it looked like a city to Marguerite, and she loved the sight of it.

  There were over a thousand sandstone ziggurats in the city, and each one was enormous. As the Subject wound his way downward—his sleeping chamber was high up this particular structure—Marguerite’s view was panoramic. The towers were all very similar, nautilus-shell spires coiling upward from red tiled plazas, the industrial structures distinguished by the smokestacks erupting from their peaks and the streams of light or dark smoke dispersing in the still air. All over the city, freshly wakened natives filled the external ways and crowded the open spaces. The sun, rapidly rising, sent fingers of yellow light down the east-facing canyons. Beyond the city Marguerite glimpsed irrigated agricultural lands; beyond that, brown scrubland and a horizon jagged with distant mountains. (And if she closed her eyes she could see the afterimage lingering in contrary colors as if unmediated by a billion dollars’ worth of incomprehensible technology, as if she were actually there, breathing the thin atmosphere, fine dust burning her nostrils.)

  Subject reached ground level, walked on through parallel bands of light and shadow to the industrial tower where he spent his days.

  Marguerite watched, ignoring her desk work. She was not a primary viewer nor was it likely she would notice anything pertinent that the five focal committees had missed. Her job was to integrate their observations, not to make her own. But that could wait at least until after lunch. The security shutdown meant that exterior agencies couldn’t read her reports in any case. She was free to watch.

  Free, if she wanted, to dream.

  She grabbed lunch at the Plaza’s west-wing staff cafeteria. Ray wasn’t there, but she caught a glimpse of his assistant Sue Sampel picking up coffee at the checkout. Marguerite had met Sue only once or twice but felt genuinely sorry for her. She knew how Ray treated his employees. Even back at Crossbank, Ray’s staff had cycled pretty quickly. Sue had probably already applied for a transfer. Or soon would. Marguerite waved; Sue absently nodded back.

  After lunch Marguerite buckled down to her paperwork. She vetted a particularly interesting report from a Physiology team leader who had put a thousand hours of video through a graphics processor, marking the motile parts of Subject’s body and correlating its changes with time of day and situation. This approach had yielded surprising amounts of hard data, which would need to go out to all the other divisions in a high-priority FYI bulletin. She’d have to compose it herself, with input from Bob Corso and Felice Kawakami of Physiology whenever they got back from the Cancun conference…a bullet-point summary, she supposed, with hints for follow-up, keeping it as succinct as possible so the various team bosses wouldn’t bitch about the added infoload.

  She kept Subject on the wall panel so she could look up from her work and see the Subject doing his. Subject worked in what was almost certainly a factory. He stood at a pedestal in a vast enclosed space under a spotlight that illuminated his station. Similar beams of light demarked similar aboriginals, hundreds of them, arrayed behind him like phosphorescent pillars in a gloomy cavern. Subject took modular parts (cylindrical devices as yet unidentified) from a bin at the side of the pillar and inserted them into prepunched disks. The disks rose from a chamber in his pedestal on an elevated platform and subsided again once he had completed them. The cycle repeated every ten minutes or so. To call it monotonous, Marguerite thought, was pushing the limits of understatement.

  But something had caught her attention.

  Because the Subject was more or less stationary, the virtual camera had rotated to image him head-on. She could see Subject’s face, stark in the overhead light. If you could call it a face. People had called it “horrifying,” but it wasn’t, of course; only intensely unfamiliar. Shocking at first because one recognized some of the component parts (the eyes, for instance, which sat in cups of bone like human eyes, though they were white through and through) while other features (the feeding arms, the mandibles) were insectile or otherwise unfamiliar. But you learned to transcend those distressing first impressions. More disturbing was the inability to see past them. To see meaning. Humans were wired to recognize human emotion reflected in human faces, and with some skill a researcher could learn to understand the expressions of apes or wolves. But Subject’s face defied interpretat
ion.

  His hands, though—

  They were hands, disturbingly humanlike. The long, flexible fingers numbered three, and the “thumb” was a fixed bony protruberance erupting from the wrist. But all the parts made instant sense. You could imagine grasping something with those hands. They moved in a fast, familiar fashion.

  Marguerite watched them work.

  Were they trembling?

  It seemed to Marguerite that the Subject’s hands were trembling.

  She forwarded a quick note to the Physiology team:

  Tremor in Subject’s hands? Looked like it (3:30 this P.M. on direct feeds). Let me know. M.

  Then she went back to her own work. It was pleasant, somehow, tapping at her keyboard with the image of the Subject over her shoulder. As if they were working together. As if she had company. As if she had a friend.

  She picked up Tess on the way home.

  It was a gym day, and on gym days Tess inevitably left school with her blouse buttoned off-kilter or her shoes untied. Today was no exception. But Tess was subdued, huddling against the autumn chill in the passenger seat, and Marguerite said nothing about her clothes. “Everything okay?”

  “I guess,” Tess said.

  “From what I hear, the data pipes are still shut down. No video tonight.”

  “We watch Sunshine City on Mondays.”

  “Yeah, but not tonight, sweetie.”

  “I have a book to read,” Tess volunteered.

  “That’s good. What are you reading?”

  “A thing about astronomy.”

  Home, Marguerite fixed dinner while Tess played in her room. Dinner was a frozen chicken entree from the Blind Lake grocery store. Dull but expedient and within the range of Marguerite’s limited culinary skills. The chicken was rotating in the microsteamer when her phone buzzed.

  Marguerite dug the talkpiece out of her shirt pocket. “Yes?”

  “Ms. Hauser?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Sorry to bother you so close to dinnertime. This is Bernie Fleischer—Tessa’s homeroom teacher.”

  “Right.” Marguerite disguised the sudden queasiness she felt. “We met in September.”

  “I was wondering whether you might be able to stop by and have a talk sometime this week.”

  “Is there a problem with Tess?”

  “Not a problem as such. I just thought we should touch base. We can talk about it in more detail when we get together.”

  Marguerite set a date and replaced the phone in her pocket.

  Please, she thought. Please, don’t let it be happening again.

  Six

  School ended early on Wednesday.

  The final bell rang at 1:30, so that the teachers could hold some kind of meeting. It had been homeroom all morning, Mr. Fleischer talking about wetlands and geography and the different kinds of birds and animals that lived around here; and Tess, although she had stared out the window most of the time, had been listening closely. Blind Lake (the lake, not the town) sounded fascinating, at least the way Mr. Fleischer described it. He had talked about the sheet of ice that had covered this part of the world, thousands upon thousands of years ago. That in itself had been intriguing. Tess had heard of the Ice Age, of course, but she had not quite grasped that it had happened here, that the land right under the school’s foundations had once been buried in an unbearable weight of ice; that the glaciers, advancing, had pushed rocks and soil before them like vast plows, and, retreating, had filled the land’s declivities and depressions with ancient water.

  Today was cloudy and cool but not rainy or unpleasant. Tess, with the afternoon before her like an unopened gift, decided to visit the wetlands, the original Blind Lake. She came across Edie Jerundt in the playground and asked whether she’d like to go too. Edie, punching a tetherball, frowned and said, “Unh-uh.” The tetherball chimed dully against its metal post. Tess shrugged and walked away.

  The ice had been here ten thousand years ago, Mr. Fleischer had said. Ten thousand summers, growing cooler if you imagined travelling backward toward the glaciers. Ten thousand winters merging into winter uninterrupted. She wondered what it had been like when the world had just begun to warm, glaciers retreating to reveal the land underneath (“ground moraine,” Mr. Fleischer had said; “washboard moraine,” whatever that meant), far-carried soil dropped from the ice to block bedrock valleys and muddy the new rivers and make fresh sod for the grasslands. Maybe everything had smelled like spring back then, Tess thought. Maybe it had smelled that way for years at a time, smelled like muck and rot and new things growing.

  And long before that, before the Ice Age, had there been a global autumn? There must have been. Tess was sure of it. A whole world made like right now, she thought, with patches of frost in the morning and being able to see your breath when you walked to school.

  She knew the wetlands lay beyond the paved spaces of town and at least a mile east, past the cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, and farther on beyond the low hill where (Edie Jerundt had told her) there was sledding in winter but the older kids were mean and would crash into you unless you came with an adult.

  It was a long walk. She followed the sidewalkless access road that led east from the town houses toward the Alley, turning aside when she reached the perimeter of that cluster of buildings. Tess had never been inside Eyeball Alley, though she had been on a school tour of the similar building back at Crossbank. To be honest, she was a little scared of the Alley. Her mother said it was just like the one at Crossbank—a duplicate of it, in fact—and Tess had not liked those deep enclosed corridors or the huge racks of O/BEC platens or the loud cry-opumps that kept them cold. All these things frightened her, more so because her then-teacher Mrs. Flewelling kept saying that these machines and processes were “not well understood.”

  She understood, at least, that images of the ocean planet at Crossbank and Lobsterville here at the Lake were generated at these places, at Eyeball Alley or what they had called at Crossbank the Big Eye. From these structures arose great mysteries. Tess had never been much impressed with the images themselves, the Subject’s static life or the even more static ocean views—they made boring video—but when she was in the mood she could stare at them the way she might stare out a window, feeling the exquisite strangeness of daylight on another planet.

  The cooling towers at Eyeball Alley emitted faint trails of steam into the afternoon air. Clouds moved above them like nervous herd animals. Tess skirted the building, keeping well clear of its perimeter fences. She cut west along a trail through the wild grass, one of the innumerable trails that had been scythed into the prairie by Blind Lake’s children. She buttoned the collar of her jacket against a rising wind.

  By the time she reached the top of the sledding hill she was already footsore and ready to turn back, but her first view of the wetlands fascinated her.

  Beyond the hill and past a grassy perimeter lay Blind Lake, a “semipermanent wetland,” Mr. Fleischer had said, a square mile of watery meadow and shallow marshes. The land was overgrown with humps of grass and broad stands of cattails, and in the patches of open water she could see resting Canada geese like the ones that had passed overhead in noisy V-formation all this autumn.

  Beyond that was another fence, or rather the same fence that surrounded all of the Blind Lake National Laboratory and the wetlands too. This land was enclosed, but it was also wild. It lay within the so-called perimeter of security. Tess, if she wandered into these marshes, would be safe from terrorist attack or espionage agents, though perhaps not from snapping turtles or muskrats. (She didn’t know what a muskrat looked like, but Mr. Fleischer had said they lived here and Tess disliked the sound of the name.)

  She walked downhill a little way farther, until the ground oozed under the pressure of her feet and the cattails loomed before her like brown sentinels with woolly heads. In a pool of still water to the left of her she could see her own reflection.

  Unless it was Mirror Girl looking back at her.


  Tess was barely willing to entertain that possibility even in the privacy of her own mind. There had been so much trouble back at Crossbank. Counselors, psychiatrists, all those endless and maddeningly patient questions she had been asked. The way people had looked at her; the way even her father and mother had looked at her, as if she had done something shameful without being aware of it. No, not that. Not again.

  Mirror Girl had only been a game.

  The problem was, the game had seemed real.

  Not real real, the way a rock or a tree was real and substantial. But more real than a dream. More real than a wish. Mirror Girl looked just like Tess and had inhabited not only mirrors (where she had first appeared) but also empty air. Mirror Girl whispered questions Tess would never have thought to ask, questions she couldn’t always answer. Mirror Girl, the therapist had said, was Tessa’s own invention; but Tess didn’t believe she could invent a personality as persistent and frequently annoying as Mirror Girl had been.

  She risked another glance at the reflective water at her feet. Water full of clouds and sky. Water where her own face looked back at an oblique angle and seemed to smile in recognition.

  Tess, said the wind, and her reflection vanished in a corrugation of ripples.

  She thought of the astronomy book she had been reading. Of the deepness of time and space in which even an Ice Age was only a moment.

  Tess, the cattails and the rushes whispered.

  “Go away,” Tess said angrily. “I don’t want any more trouble with you.”